ARPA-E Wants To Create Digital Humans To Save Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy is betting on the future of what it calls digital transportation technologies.

In March, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), a part of the Energy Department, announced that it would provide $9.5 million in funding to develop “ultra-low energy communications technologies that are preferable to today’s practice of driving or flying for the purposes of in-person communication.” ARPA-E funds research that enhances the nation’s economic and energy security by reducing energy imports and improving energy efficiency.

In other words. ARPA-E wants to create the first generation of a genuinely Digital Human (DH), or “a bandwidth-efficient, three-dimensional digital representation of a person that is nearly indistinguishable from the communication partner in real life.”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, passenger transportation is responsible for 70% of all the energy consumed annually – or the equivalent of roughly 568 gigawatts of electricity – for transportation. Indeed, although the electric power sector makes up a larger share of total U.S. energy consumption than the transportation sector, CO2 emissions from transportation exceeded the emissions from the electric power sector in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Unlike freight transportation, people are transported when their presence is demanded for one reason or another in another location.

Today’s telecommunications technologies are simply not capable of replicating the experience of in-person interactions. Studies has suggested several reasons why this is so. In particular, telecommunications technologies are unable to create the “sense of presence one typically feels when co-located in a physical environment with other individuals” and “an immersive environment which eliminates distractions from physical reality, thereby achieving the same level of focus one has in a face-to-face meeting.”

The fidelity of face to face communications is simply better than anything technology has to offer. Not to say that technology has nothing to offer. On the contrary, ARPA-E’s Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for FACES highlights recent advances in telecommunications technologies that may provide set the stage for a fundamental breakthrough in digital communications.

ARPA-E describes the Digital Ira project, developed by NVIDIA and Activision at the University of Southern California, as “one of the most photorealistic DH models demonstrated to date.” Here a few other examples of the cutting edge in telecommunications technologies:

Immersive Telepresence Systems : In 2014, CISCO announced the development of the CISCO IX5000 Telepresence system, which can transmit verbal and nonverbal cues using high-quality, 1080p60 video at data transmission rates of greater than 10,800 kbps. To put this in perspective, low-quality video conferencing is capable of transmitting data at 128 kbps.

3D-Enabled Virtual Environments : State of the art virtual environments like Linden Lab’s Second Life platform require much less bandwidth than videoconferencing by representing the users as digital, animated characters. In addition, head mounted displays are being developed that enable greater immersion in 3D environments, which can eliminate distractions from the surrounding physical environment.

The FACES project aims to “merge the level of immersion capable in 3D environments with the visual fidelity of information transferred by high-quality video” and create “a DH with the necessary qualities of photorealism, human-like representation, and behavior consistent with the levels of fidelity expected from in-person interactions.”

ARPA-E plans to announce funding awards for the FACES project in July.

I am Vice President for Regulatory Strategy and Special Projects at Genbright LLC. The views expressed on this blog are my own and should not be attributed in any way to my Genbright or Forbes.

William Pentland is a Vice President for Regulatory Strategy and Special Projects at Genbright LLC. Views expressed are solely those of the author and should not be attributed to Genbright.